Olin's small campus perches atop a hill in a forested area amid the affluent suburbs of Needham and Wellesley, a half-hour drive west of Boston. The school's largest building, with all its classrooms and laboratories, is the Academic Center, a four-story structure curved around an oval lawn, a long row of tall columns running along its glass facade. Across the oval two other curvy buildings house administration and faculty offices, the library, an auditorium, student activities rooms, and the dining hall. The buildings, with their beige brick walls and white interiors with wooden, glass, and stainless-steel details, have a sleek, quasi-antiseptic feel—a stark contrast to many Boston-area campuses and their centuries-old, ivy-covered red brick.

But the differences between those traditional schools and Olin really become clear when you step into a class like Linder's Design Nature. The course exemplifies one of the key beliefs underlying Olin's philosophy: design—the process of transforming an idea into a useful thing—is the core of what engineers do.

Linder, who studied product design at MIT before becoming a mechanical engineering professor at Olin, tells me that his course is a "bio-inspired introduction to design." The class includes two projects during the semester. The first is a mechanical hopper. Students consider click beetles, springtails, spittlebugs, and fleas. They study how the insects propel themselves, and they use that knowledge to design their own hoppers, he explains. "Did I show you the damage one did to the ceiling?"

The second project, more challenging, is the glass wall climber, which the students make out of plastic pieces, electric motors, pneumatic actuators, and suction cups. To fabricate the parts they need, they use Olin's two machine shops, which have a plastic thermoformer, a laser cutter, and other tools that they are certified as freshmen to operate. And to evaluate the climbers' traits—a gecko's gait, for example—the students hold an entertaining demonstration. "Lots of stuff in engineering are done without a whole bunch of science. These students are quite capable of a lot of stuff now, and we don't need to deny that."

In most traditional schools, students sit through separate calculus, physics, and chemistry lectures during the first two years and have only a few canned-type laboratories. Olin doesn't eliminate each and every "chalk and talk" lecture; some professors do teach that way. But Olin's curriculum, unlike conventional ones, tightly integrates the basic disciplines with practical projects.

To see how this interdisciplinary approach works, I head out to a Math/Physics class, which, like the Design Nature class, meets in a studio setting. The instructors are electrical engineering professor Mark Somerville and math professor John Geddes. They tell me that days earlier the students attended lecture-style classes on topics such as differential equations and kinematics of rigid bodies. Today the students are being assigned a four-week-long final project: conceiving a mechanical system that incorporates those topics and then modeling, simulating, and building it. The goal is that they understand important engineering concepts like feedback and control, as well as learn how to work in teams, communicate, and manage schedules.

"Today the main deliverable is the proposal for the final project," announces Somerville, who is tall and thin and considered dropping out of graduate school to become a chef. "We're expecting you to devote some serious time on this." Geddes, who has spiky reddish-blond hair and an earring, moves with Somerville from group to group, asking students somewhat Socratically about their project ideas and why they made the choices they did.

One group wants to build a model of a satellite orbiting a planet; another envisions an off-balance Ferris wheel that is heavier in one segment; a third group dreams up a pendulum with a ball at its tip that rolls as it swings. At one table, freshmen Andrea Striz and Sylvia Schwartz work on an ambitious idea, but they swear me to secrecy. "We want to patent it later on, so it's better if you don't mention it," Striz says. I ask if I can use the title of their project, but they are still very concerned about their intellectual property. "You can say it's music related," Schwartz says, adding that she plays the violin and Striz plays the trumpet. "We're trying to combine our passions with our classes."